Professional and Personal Use of Reflection by Engineering Faculty, Students, and Practitioners

Reflection has long been recognized as an integral part of a person’s every day and professional and/or academic life. Recently the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) has been working to promote reflection across the engineering education community within the United States. The following study leverages the authors’ involvement, experiences, and observations within CPREE to capture the use of reflection in professional and personal settings by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. Researchers from four distinctly different institutions have collected data from 460 engineering participants. Participants were asked to respond to three open-ended prompts eliciting their definitions of reflection in their own words, examples of reflection use in their personal lives, and examples of reflection use in their professional and/or academic lives. These questions were posed to better understand how each group perceives and uses reflection in their personal and professional lives. The results of this study provide valuable insights into the similarities and differences across groups, which can be used to inform how the professional skill of reflection is taught and practiced within engineering curricula.